AtDDtA1: "The Great Bovine City of the World"

[Dave Monroe]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
Date: Apr 3, 2008 3:45 PM
Subject: Re: AtDDtA1: "The Great Bovine City of the World"
To: pynchon-l at waste.org


On 1/23/07, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:

>  "Beneath the rubbernecking Chums of Chance wheeled streets and
> alleyways in a Cartesian grid, sketched in sepia, mile on mile.  'The
> Great Bovine City of the World,' breathed Lindsay in wonder.  Indeed,
> the backs of cattle far outnumbered the tops of human hats.  From this
> height it was as if the Chums, who, out on adventures past, had often
> witnessed the vast herds of cattle adrift in ever-changing cloudlike
> patterns across the Western plains, here saw that unshaped freedom
> being rationalized into movement only in straight lines and at right
> angles and a progressive reduction of choices, until the final turn
> through the final gate that led to the killing-floor."  (AtD, Pt. I,
> Ch. 2, p. 10)

http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0701&msg=114381

Cf. as well ...

"If there is an inevitability to arrival by water, he reflected, as we
watch the possibilities on shore being progressively narrowed at last
to the destined quay or slip, there is no doubt a mirror-symmetry
about departure, a denial of inevitability, an opening out from the
point of embarkation, beginning the moment all lines are singled up,
an unllossening of fate as the unknown and perhaps the uncreated
begins to make its appearance ahead and astern, port and starboard,
everywhere an expanding of possibility." (AtD, Pt. IV, p. 821)

Cited in...

Paolo Simonetti, "Like metaphor, only different"

http://www.graat.fr/6%20Simonetti.pdf
http://www.graat.fr/readingpynchon.htm